1 BTC = 1 BTC
How Bitcoin supporters are being fooled.
With 3 million followers on Twitter, Michael Saylor is one of the best-known and widest-reaching Bitcoin maximalists and $BTC promoters. He doesn't miss a day without regaling his followers with "wisdom" about Bitcoin.
He skillfully mixes truth with untruth to maintain the narrative of the all-powerful, unbeatable Bitcoin that is independent of any control. One of his most shared tweets reads:
On the surface, this even seems correct, but it couldn't be more misleading. Each Bitcoin and each of its 100m sub-units (satoshis, sats) is identifiable and therefore traceable, so can be accurately attributed to each transaction via the public ledger.
More correctly and immediately recognizable to everyone as unequal, the above formula would therefore have to read, for example, as follows:
BTC1 (125pNjdtCdYjUto253T6NHNXVgR7gDQnFK8) ≠
BTC2 (167pMCfgHJjdtCd574YjUtoTYghwOlKgnsrTG)
Bitcoin lacks not only anonymity but also fungibility, one of the most important properties of all for it to be usable as a means of payment.
Since every single transaction can be tracked precisely, Bitcoins that have been involved in non-legal transactions can easily be identified and blacklisted (so-called "tainted coins").
As a private person, one hardly has the possibility to check whether Bitcoins are blacklisted or not. One simply has to trust not to get such Bitcoins.
Andreas Antonopoulos, also a Bitcoin maximalist, but who has retained a certain skepticism despite all the euphoria for Bitcoin, puts it in a nutshell:
"Tainted coins are destructive. If you break fungibility and privacy, you break the currency."
Pretty pictures and euphonious platitudes in Michael Saylor's tweets are meant to blind his followers to the fact that any argument in favor of Bitcoin is basically moot from the start, since Bitcoin is neither anonymous nor fungible.
A sample of his vacuous, euphonious platitudes can be seen in the tweet he himself pinned under his profile:
An entire industry now thrives solely on tracking and matching transactions to living individuals. Chainlink, Cyphertrace, Palantir and others make millions in revenue every year by analyzing the ledgers of cryptocurrencies that are public and available for anyone to see.
Central exchange platforms (CEX) routinely check incoming cryptocurrencies for tainted coins and confiscate them if necessary. Even at the mining level, $BTC can now be checked for tainted coins and, if necessary, not processed further.
Bitcoins on a blacklist understandably do not have the same value as those not listed there. Freshly mined Bitcoins without a transaction history even trade at a premium.
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/op-ed-will-regulations-put-a-premium-on-virgin-bitcoin
Sophisticated intelligent analysis techniques have made Bitcoin completely transparent today. The concentration of mining on a few large mining farms continues to increase and poses the risk of government intervention in the mining process.
Already today, tainted coins are partially detected at the mining level and not processed further. This can be very easily extended by law to coins of any bitcoin wallet.
As a very successful businessman, Michael Saylor certainly cannot be accused of stupidity. He knows very well about this fact. Why he nevertheless keeps making this misleading statement (1 BTC = 1 BTC) to his followers is anyone's guess.
Is he making a run for it because he is extremely highly invested in $BTC and cannot get out without realizing horrendous losses? Or does he have an entirely different agenda?
Saylor is a proponent of government regulation of cryptocurrencies. Does he just want to eliminate annoying competition in this way and save his own investment, or is he working in the interest of other forces that seek all-encompassing control of every individual?
State regulation and control is exactly the opposite of what Bitcoin was supposed to achieve: a peer-to-peer payment system that is independent of a central authority and cannot be controlled.
However, today $BTC can by no means be called a peer-to-peer payment system anymore. Only about 1% of all $BTC users operate their own full node and can also only perform peer-to-peer with participants who also operate a full node. This will not happen in all cases even with this 1%.
All others are dependent on third-party full nodes, of which they do not know who is operating them and what data is being tapped there. Without their own full node, however, peer-to-peer use is not possible from the outset.
95% of all $BTC users additionally entrust their Bitcoins to a third party for custody, which allows for monitoring, blocking, confiscation and fractional reserve. Much like the traditional banking system that $BTC was originally designed to replace.
Even more striking is the takeover of Bitcoin by the existing banking system in the much-touted Lightning network, which can only reach 0.05 - 0.07% of all Bitcoin users in the first place. Since the beginning of 2022, the number of users has even been declining.
For autonomous use, a dedicated full node is required here as well, which very few operate. The Lightning Network also only receives meaningful use through the large hubs run by large financial institutions that Bitcoin was originally intended to replace.
David Shares makes a strong warning against using the Lightning Network:
“WARNING: If you try to use the Lightning Network (LN) you are at HIGH RISK of losing funds and it is not recommended or safe to do at this time or for the foreseeable future.”
Bitcoin is not about to replace the traditional banking system, but is slowly being taken over by it. A comparison of $BTC today with the 2008 whitepaper leaves no doubt about this.
Those who are enthusiastic about the idea of Bitcoin will be even more so about EPIC Cash, which is 100% in line with Bitcoin's DNA.
For more information, visit, epiccash.com
I posted some excerpts from this on Nostr, a new social network heavy with Bitcoin-maximalists, and here was a response:
"There is a high amount of motivated reasoning going on here. While some of the points are valid, they seem without respect for issues under active development, and are subject to the same fallacies as those the writer is accusing others of making.
"For instance, saying bitcoin's blockchain is too big ignores things like
-its gotten this big more so as a product of its transactional record, ordinals are new and haven't contributed the bulk of data on chain
-while data storage hasn't scaled as fast as anyone was hoping, the bitcoin blockchain is still a long ways from breaking the 1tb drives that I suspect most people buy for their nodes. We have seen full nodes run on phones, recently. I can personally attest to the reality that data storage is still getting cheaper, so says my 48tb nas; most people only buy a 1tb drive because that's all that's necessary, why would you spend a cent extra on storage when even by current metrics its going to hold out for years to come?
-pruning cuts data storage requirements down heavily, and still provides a cryptographically verifiable record
"Saying 95% of bitcoin is held by exchanges is without citation, and sounds revised up from the last unfounded number of 87%. Almost a million bitcoin has sat in cold storage for over a year now, which should immediately invalidate any claim to this being accurate, as should the fact that exchange holdings are at 5 year lows.
"Saying that lightning is failing ignores that its basically a public alpha, and there are numerous projects in development to improve everything from the GUI to channel rebalancing. Further, comparing it to the existing banking system is an out and out lie, where there is no such thing as justice transactions, the monetary base can be inflated or deflates at will for political reasons, and overall offers zero monetary assurances.
"Saying that bitcoin isn't p2p because people don't operate their own nodes ignores that any single node can broadcast your transaction to the network, your transaction cannot be manipulated in any meaningful way, and verifying that a transaction was mined can be done with a high degree of certainty without a full node by running the checksum against the blockheader and difficulty, which can be automated by an app on your phone.
"Saying that mining is forever lost to the big pools ignores stratum v2 and the fact that pools are made up of individual miners, and were they ever to attack the network they would find themselves without the money to continue operations.
"Saying that transactions can be tracked ignores not only coinjoin wallets like wasabi, not only developments like lightning and cashu, but most importantly that these companies have admitted that this is "an art, not a science", so saying its intelligent and sophisticated, or that bitcoin can be tracked precisely, is misleading at best.
"I'm not for the bitcoin fangirling I see, but the author is clearly motivated to gloss over the details to pump their shitcoin."
https://highlighter.com/e/note13n5xx6n24r0m4j6snsxjrvgve59fmgv40jn6w5wr8e2gwujt9agspwazk4